This seems to me like a very solid analysis of this issue. I might quibble with a minor point or two, but nothing that at all invalidates his argument. It’s nice to hear it coming from someone who obviously cares very much about the environment. For me it’s good to hear it coming from someone involved with effective altruism, because whatever your feelings about EA, they tend to be pretty careful about their data and their calculations.

Tl;dr: see the two graphs I included.

This post is about why it’s not bad for the environment if you or any number of people use ChatGPT, Claude, or other large language models (LLMs). You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.

This post is not about the broader climate impacts of AI beyond chatbots, or about whether LLMs are unethical for other reasons (copyright, hallucinations, risks from advanced AI, etc.). AI image generators use about the same energy as AI chatbots, so everything I say here about ChatGPT also applies to AI images.

My goal is to fairly and charitably address each common environmental criticism of ChatGPT that’s normally brought up. If you think I’m getting anything wrong I’d really appreciate you saying so, either in the comments or somewhere else I can read it!

Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

Screenshot

Today, on National Dolphin Day, Google, in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), is announcing progress on DolphinGemma: a foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin-like sound sequences. This approach in the quest for interspecies communication pushes the boundaries of AI and our potential connection with the marine world.

DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

The longest chain of parasitism that I’ve been able to find:

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/28549

Interestingly, in order to support many levels of parasitoids, each level has to be extremely efficient, managing to use nearly all of the body mass of its one host.

See Interactions to the fifth trophic level: secondary and tertiary parasitoid wasps show extraordinary efficiency in utilizing host resources

Not a terribly good article, but assuming the underlying science is robust, it’s interesting to start to get a look at what causes subjective feelings of tiredness.

Despite this huge burden on our collective well-being, the question of what it means to “have energy” had, until recently, attracted surprisingly little medical research. Into the void stepped the trillion-dollar wellness industry, offering no end of ways to boost our vigour with various supplements, diets and lifestyle hacks.

Now, though, scientists are taking a fresh look at what it means to feel energised – or not – and the research is revealing that how we perceive this state largely hinges on the brain’s ongoing assessment of how much energy is available to our cells. This discovery is changing how we think about our general health, opening up possible new avenues to treat clinical levels of fatigue, and suggesting practical things we can all do to stop feeling like we are running on empty.

The fact that so many otherwise healthy people feel so tired doesn’t seem to make sense. Many of us, at least in the West, have easy access to far more calories than we need. If feeling good were simply a matter of calories in, energy out, we would all be bursting with vim and vigour.

So why aren’t we? The short answer is that the energy we can feel – our “subjective vitality” – isn’t like a simple readout on a tank of fuel. Instead, it is an ongoing body-brain estimate of how much energy is available in the body and how much is already accounted for, and an educated guess of whether we have any to spare for what we need to do next.

https://archive.is/UpvIu

[I]f Democrats want to understand why they’re failing to achieve their goals in the places they control, they need to concede that the faulty party also lives in the mirror. Look at California. Its most populous cities are run by Democrats. Every statewide elected official in California is a Democrat. Liberals should be able to say: “Vote for Democrats, and we’ll turn America into California!” Instead, with the state’s infamously high cost of living and stark homelessness crisis, it is conservatives who can say: “Vote for Democrats, and they’ll turn America into California.” Liberal governance should be an advertisement for itself, not for its opposition.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/abundance-americas-next-political-order/682069/

Recent evidence indicates that the emergence of stone tool technology occurred before the appearance of the genus Homo¹ and may potentially be traced back deep into the primate evolutionary line. Conversely, osseous technologies are apparently exclusive of later hominins from approximately 2 million years ago (Ma), whereas the earliest systematic production of bone tools is currently restricted to European Acheulean sites 400–250 thousand years ago. Here we document an assemblage of bone tools shaped by knapping found within a single stratigraphic horizon at Olduvai Gorge dated to 1.5 Ma. Large mammal limb bone fragments, mostly from hippopotamus and elephant, were shaped to produce various tools, including massive elongated implements. Before our discovery, bone artefact production in pre-Middle Stone Age African contexts was widely considered as episodic, expedient and unrepresentative of early Homo toolkits. However, our results demonstrate that at the transition between the Oldowan and the early Acheulean, East African hominins developed an original cultural innovation that entailed a transfer and adaptation of knapping skills from stone to bone. By producing technologically and morphologically standardized bone tools, early Acheulean toolmakers unravelled technological repertoires that were previously thought to have appeared routinely more than 1 million years later.

Here is the full article, in Nature, by Ignacio de la Torre, et.al.  Again, do not forget Cowen’s 17th Law: “Most things have origins much earlier than what you thought.”  Via Charles C. Mann.  So exactly which of our other, broader views do we need to update?

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/03/systematic-bone-tool-production-at-1-5-million-years-ago.html

Noise Surround System traveled to MDF Festival and the Philharmonic of Szczecin, one of Poland’s top three noisiest cities. Noise pollution is a serious problem that can exacerbate stress, disturb sleep, and produce hearing loss.

Of course, sound artists can put noise to a purpose. And so it is that the normally cocooned-off Philharmonic space is beautifully disturbed with speakers on tracks. (Hey, I have an idea for a really aggressive alarm clock.) That challenges the idea of the concert space as palace, instead colliding with the urban environment. And as you can see in the video, it all coalesces into something harmonious, featuring the sounds of the orchestra.

From panGenerator’s description:

The installation is a rather large structure of 4,5m in height and about 7m of diameter that allows the audience to get surrounded by the spatialised audio emitted from the 8 motorised trolleys of bespoke design that were engineered from scratch for the purpose of this project. The audiovisual choreography is driven by custom software that remotely controls the light, sound and movement. In terms of sound design we used sounds sampled from the noisiest parts of Szczecin and transformed them in realtime using dedicated pure data audio patch – controlling the playback in sync with movement and light emitted by the trolleys.

Noise Surround System makes spatial audio kinetic, mechanical – CDM Create Digital Music

It’s a list, it’s hard to pick a pithy excerpt to show. Good, though!

https://dynomight.substack.com/p/things

Another post on the experience of wild animals, although it doesn’t make the same attempt at rigor that the previous post did.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/guest-blog/bambi-or-bessie-are-wild-animals-happier/

I’ve been wondering for a while about The typical day-to-day life and experience of animals, especially in my own habitat. Although there’s plenty of literature on individual species, it’s hard to find anything that tries to look at overall patterns. So far this is the closest thing I’ve found. Warning: some parts may be distressing, although not enough that I personally felt distressed.

https://longtermrisk.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/#How_Wild_Animals_Suffer